1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to flash memory technology, and more particularly to scalable charge trapping memory technology adaptable for high speed erase and program operations.
2. Description of Related Art
Flash memory is a class of non-volatile integrated circuit memory technology. Traditional flash memory employs floating gate memory cells. As the density increases in memory devices, and the floating gate memory cells get closer and closer together, interference between the charge stored in adjacent floating gates becomes a problem. This is limiting the ability to increase the density of flash memory based on floating gate memory cells. Another type of memory cell used for flash memory can be referred to as a charge trapping memory cell, which uses a dielectric charge trapping layer in place of the floating gate. Charge trapping memory cells use dielectric charge trapping material that does not cause cell-to-cell interference like that encountered with floating gate technology, and is expected to be applied for higher density flash memory.
The typical charge trapping memory cell consists of a field effect transistor FET structure having a source and drain separated by a channel, and a gate separated from the channel by a stack of dielectric material including a tunnel dielectric layer, the charge storage layer, and a blocking dielectric layer. According to the early conventional designs referred to as SONOS devices, the source, drain and channel are formed in a silicon substrate (S), the tunnel dielectric layer is formed of silicon oxide (O), the charge storage layer is formed of silicon nitride (N), the blocking dielectric layer is formed a silicon oxide (O), and the gate comprises polysilicon (S). The SONOS device is programmed by electron tunneling using one of a number of well-known biasing technologies, and erased by hole tunneling or electron de-trapping. In order to achieve practical operational speeds for the erase operation, the tunneling dielectric layer must be quite thin (less than 30 Å). However at that thickness, the endurance and charge retention characteristics of the memory cell are poor relative to traditional floating gate technology. Also, with relatively thick tunneling dielectric layers, the electric field required for the erase operation also cause electron injection from the gate through the blocking dielectric layer. This electron injection causes an erase saturation condition in which the charge level in the charge trapping device converges on an equilibrium level. See, U.S. Pat. No. 7,075,828, entitled “Operation Scheme with Charge Balancing Erase for Charge Trapping Non-Volatile Memory”, invented by Lue et al. However, if the erase saturation level is too high, the cell cannot be erased at all, or the threshold margin between the programmed and erased states becomes too small for many applications.
On one hand, technology has been investigated to improve the ability of the blocking dielectric layer to reduce electron injection from the gate for the high electric fields needed for erase. See, U.S. Pat. No. 6,912,163, entitled “Memory Device Having High Work Function Gate and Method of Erasing Same,” Invented by Zheng et al., issued 28 Jun. 2005; and U.S. Pat. No. 7,164,603, entitled “Operation Scheme with High Work Function Gate and Charge Balancing for Charge Trapping Non-Volatile Memory”, invented by Shih et al., Shin et al., “A Highly Reliable SONOS-type NAND Flash Memory Cell with Al2O3 or Top Oxide,” IEDM, 2003 (MANOS); and Shin et al., “A Novel NAND-type MONOS Memory using 63 nm Process Technology for a Multi-Gigabit Flash EEPROMs”, IEEE 2005. In the just-cited references, the second Shin et al. article describes a SONOS type memory cell in which the gate is implemented using tantalum nitride and the blocking dielectric layer is implemented using aluminum oxide (referred to as the TANOS device), which maintains a relatively thick tunneling dielectric layer at about 4 nm. The relatively high work function of tantalum nitride inhibits electron injection through the gate, and the high dielectric constant of aluminum oxide reduces the magnitude of the electric field through the blocking dielectric layer relative to the electric field for the tunneling dielectric layer. Shin et al. report a trade-off between the breakdown voltage of the memory cell, the thickness of the aluminum oxide layer and the thickness of the tunneling dielectric layer. With a 4 nm thick silicon dioxide tunneling dielectric in a TANOS device, relatively high erase voltages are proposed in order to achieve erase speeds. An increase in erase speeds would require increasing the voltages applied or decreasing the thickness of the tunneling dielectric layer. Increasing the voltage applied for erase is limited by the breakdown voltage. Decreasing the thickness of the tunneling dielectric layer is limited by issues of charge retention, as mentioned above.
On the other hand, technology has been investigated to improve the performance of the tunneling dielectric layer for erase at lower electric fields. See, U.S. Patent Application Publication No. US 2006/0198189 A1, “Non-Volatile Memory Cells, Memory Arrays Including the Same and Method of Operating Cells and Arrays,” Invented by Lue et al., publication date Sep. 7, 2006 (describing a “BE-SONOS device”); Lue et al., “BE-SONOS: A Bandgap Engineered SONOS with Excellent Performance and Reliability”, IEEE, December 2005; Wang et al., “Reliability and Processing Effects of the Bandgap Engineered SONOS (BE-SONOS) Flash Memory”, IEEE, May 2007. See also, U.S. Patent Application Publication No. 2006/0261401 A1, entitled “Novel Low Power Non-Volatile Memory and Gate Stack”, by Bhattacharyya, published 23 Nov. 2006.
BE-SONOS technology has been proven to provide excellent performance, overcoming many of the erase speed, endurance and charge retention issues of prior art SONOS type memory. However, the problem of the erase saturation continues to limit operational parameters of the device. Furthermore, as the device sizes shrink, it is expected that erase saturation problems will intensify.
These prior art technologies have emphasized the advantages of high-K dielectrics like aluminum oxide. The higher dielectric constant can improve/performance by enhancing the program and erase speed, improving the memory window in threshold voltage for the cells, and reducing the operating voltage during program and erase by reducing the effective oxide thickness EOT. However, it is difficult to manufacture high κ materials like aluminum oxide with high quality. Therefore, the use of high κ materials for the blocking dielectric comes with the trade-off of lower reliability and lower data retention.
Accordingly, is desirable to provide a new memory technology which is readily manufactured with high quality, and overcomes the reliability and data retention issues of prior art technologies, and that can be applied in very small memory devices.